Portrait of Gab Bois © Pegah Farahmand

Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist Gab Bois has cultivated an expansive social media following due to her unconventional, yet vibrant artistic creations. Together with Artsper, learn more about her artistic journey, creative process, and relationship with digital tools!

1. Hi Gab! Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

Hi, of course! My name is Gab Bois, I'm based in Montreal, Canada, and most of the time, I do concept-based photography. I enjoy sitting near dog parks, most cheeses, and the months of April to September.

2. How would you describe your relationship to art? Were you always passionate about it?

I've always had crafty hobbies. I loved drawing as a child and doing arts and crafts in the yard: I'd make houses for the backyard's snails, themed hotels for the stray cats, and restaurants serving flower salads and dirt cakes. As a teenager, I'd spend hours cutting up tiny photos from magazines, turning them into a mosaic on my bedroom wall, or painting an old dresser that my parents let me customize. I feel like what I do now is an extension of some of those childhood passions.

On the left: Still Frame Glasses, 2022 and on the right: Shellphone, 2020 © Gab Bois

3. When did you discover your love for photography and multidisciplinary art?

In Quebec, where I'm from, we have this thing where you can do a two or three-year degree between high school and university, and unless you want to work in a scientific field, it can be pretty much whatever you want. I decided to do mine in visual arts. During those years, I got to play around with a lot of different mediums and had my first photography class. It's funny because I wasn't really interested in it at the time, I didn't like all the technical elements. After that degree, I moved on to studying what was supposed to lead me to my real career: teaching elementary school students. While I was doing my bachelor's, I started taking photos on a little point-and-shoot camera and uploading them to Instagram. Eventually, I interrupted my degree to pursue photography and that was already almost seven years ago. Over time, I got the chance to experiment with different mediums. I've always said that photography was the fastest way to immortalize an idea, but now I'm also interested in slower ways to create a physical representation of some of those ideas, such as sculptures, installations, and object design.

4. How do you choose objects to create? What is your artistic process?

The process always varies in time depending on the medium and subject but there's always that same structure: idealization, pre-production, production, and post-production. The ideas come as they please, so I try to keep myself in a receptive headspace so that I'm ready to catch them when they decide to come. Sometimes I also have to sit down and brainstorm. Pre-production involves everything from sketching out the idea to gathering the materials I need for a piece, making the set, figuring out composition, etc. Production is the actual shooting of the piece. Finally, post-production is the retouching element that also varies so much depending on each piece. For the most part, I like to use retouching to clean up the images but I try to limit it as much as possible because I find it more rewarding when the concept is as final as possible in real life. However, there is the occasional photo that requires more retouching and digital modifications.

On the left: a present box, 2022 and on the right: Mario Bellini's Camaleon-dough sofa, 2022 © Gab Bois

5. You've gained an impressive online following, cultivating a large digital presence. How would you say the role of social media has affected your career?

It's affected a ton of aspects of both my life and career, most of the time, in a very positive way. I feel very lucky because I've been able to keep a healthy distance from social media through all of this. Something that's always been very important to me is to keep my page about my work rather than myself, or else I get uncomfortable. Most of the clients I've worked with knew me from social media, so it's undeniable that it has played a very important role in developing my career. On a more personal level, Instagram has allowed me to meet some of my dearest friends and connected me to people who I never would have had the opportunity to meet if it wasn't for that.

6. Do you have any upcoming projects or events that you are excited about? If so, can you tell us a bit about it?

I do! I am currently working on a fashion accessory line and on my second solo show. Both are scheduled to launch/start in the fall of this year. In the last years, I've been working very hard to take some of my work out of social media, and move it to physical spaces and into people's homes, and these are two projects that take a step further in that direction.